Standard shader with vertex colors

Isn't there a legacy vertex color shader in unity or at least an easy way to use vertex colors fromsurface shaders in hte pbr workflow?

 

There is! In fact I eventually use it more then this shader. It's almost like an "Old" surface shader but with StandardSurfaceOutput instead of SurfaceOutput

Code (CSharp):

1. void surf (Input IN, inout SurfaceOutputStandard o)
2. {
3.     fixed4 c = tex2D (_MainTex, IN.uv_MainTex) * _Color;
4.     o.Albedo = c.rgb * IN.color;
5.     // Metallic and smoothness come from slider variables
6.     o.Metallic = _Metallic;
7.     o.Smoothness = _Glossiness;
8.     o.Alpha = c.a;
9. }

the only problem is you have to write Normal mapping, Parallax etc yourself, while this shader has it built in

 

Thankyou defaxer, so in theory I can just create a default Unity standard surface shader, add this line:

o.Albedo= c.rgb*IN.color;​

And I'm good to go, so why you had to make you shader in vs/fs? doesn't Unity's default tamplate shader cover that already?
And what about a built-in vertex lit shaders, I cant find one that shows my vertex color (FBX imported from ZBrush using their new FBX Import/Export plugin).
Thank you for your help

 

In StandardSurfaceOutput shader case you'll loose universality of Standard shader. You'll have to write support for Detail, Normal, Specular maps use yourself. Plus you'll need to write CustomEditor for your new Shader to automaticaly enable/disable use of those maps.
AFAIK none of Unity builtin shaders except Particle and Sprite support vertex color

 

Man you're right, I also lose emission, occlusion, secondary maps and so on. anyone has a link to a surface shader that mimics Unity's built-in standard shader. I checked the one shipped with Unity but it's 300+ lines of vs/fs and ShaderLab.

 

Code (csharp):

1. Shader "Custom/Damned Shader" {
2.     Properties {
3.         _Color ("Color", Color) = (1,1,1,1)
4.         _MainTex ("Albedo (RGB)", 2D) = "white" {}
5.         _Glossiness ("Smoothness", Range(0,1)) = 0.5
6.         _Metallic ("Metallic", Range(0,1)) = 0.0
7.     }
8.     SubShader {
9.         Tags { "RenderType"="Opaque" }
10.         LOD 200
11.      
12.         CGPROGRAM
13.         // Physically based Standard lighting model, and enable shadows on all light types
14.         #pragma surface surf Standard fullforwardshadows
15.  
16.         // Use shader model 3.0 target, to get nicer looking lighting
17.         #pragma target 3.0
18.  
19.         sampler2D _MainTex;
20.  
21.         struct Input {
22.             float2 uv_MainTex;
23.             float4 vcolor : COLOR;
24.         };
25.  
26.         half _Glossiness;
27.         half _Metallic;
28.         fixed4 _Color;
29.  
30.         void surf (Input IN, inout SurfaceOutputStandard o) {
31.             // Albedo comes from a texture tinted by color
32.             fixed4 c = tex2D (_MainTex, IN.uv_MainTex) * _Color;
33.             o.Albedo = c.rgb * IN.vcolor;
34.             // Metallic and smoothness come from slider variables
35.             o.Metallic = _Metallic;
36.             o.Smoothness = _Glossiness;
37.             o.Alpha = c.a;
38.         }
39.         ENDCG
40.     }
41.     FallBack "Diffuse"
42. }

I got:

Code (csharp):

1. Shader error in 'Custom/Damned Shader': Bad characters in source file at line 33 (on )

 

I guess you've already found out mistype. But, just in case )

 

I still can't find what wrong.

 

i''m terribly sorry, i've misread your code.

 

Try renaming vcolor to color to see if this fixes the error. I have a feeling that this might be a requirement though it is not documented.

 

Exactly what I needed! Thanks defaxer!

 

It was color to begin with, I actually thought it maybe a conflict so I changed it to vcolor.

 

Hello! Love the Vertex shader w/fade, super useful for polygon effects work. But I'm using the shader in my project at the moment and I'm getting the red error message,

Shader error in 'Standard Specular (Vertex Color)': failed to open source file: 'UnityVC.cginc' at line 89 (on d3d11)

Compiling Vertex program with DIRECTIONAL SHADOWS_SCREEN LIGHTMAP_OFF DIRLIGHTMAP_OFF DYNAMICLIGHTMAP_OFF _NORMALMAP _VERTEXCOLOR _SPECGLOSSMAP
​

Any idea what could be causing this? I've moved the UnityVC folder to my own shaders folder in the project, but the file UnityVC.cginc is in the same folder as the StandardSpecularVC shader.

Many thanks!

--Rev

 

Hi,
I have a problem using this shader.
If i just drag a material to the debug sphere and choose the shader it works perfect and colors the sphere.
But if I run my script (within i create a mesh) and apply the same material to the mesh, it stays single colored.

Is there anything else I have to do ?
I want to color the mesh equal to the higth component of the vertex points.

 

Moving shader files around a project folder doesn't give me that error. Are you sure all shader files
StandardSpecularVC.shader, StandardVC.shader and UnityVC.cginc are in the same folder?

Is mesh you generate already have vertex color? By default meshes generated in Unity don't have any vertex color.

 

Yes, i set the color to green and then apply the material with the shader.
Here is my code:

Code (CSharp):

1.  
2.       Color[] colors = new Color[mesh.vertices.Length];
3.         for (int l = 0; l < colors.Length; l++){
4.             colors[l] = Color.green;
5.         }
6.         mesh.colors = colors;
7.  
8.         Renderer  rend = GetComponent<Renderer>();
9.         rend.material = new Material(Shader.Find("Standard (Vertex Color)"));
10.  

 

Shader uses Shader keywords to enable vertex color rendering. So in your code you need to add

Code (CSharp):

1.  
2. rend.material.EnableKeyword("_VERTEXCOLOR");
3.  

 

I added the line, but it is still not working.

 

You can try to apply an existing material (created in editor, not on runtime) and see if it works on your mesh.

 

Hello defaxer, thank you so much for your shader, it is everything I wanted! However I'm encountering an issue with alpha sorting on my personal project. I'm using your shader for a waterfall with vert alpha to blend edges, however it's sorting behind the Water4 shader that comes with the standard package (in fact, almost anything with alpha is sorting behind it...). The only way for the waterfall to sort above the Water4 is to use "cutout", but I lose the vertex alpha. Is there a solution for this?

See: http://i.imgur.com/MdCRjw9.jpg

 

Seems the particle sprites just intersect the water4 mesh, the first guess I'd use is to add depth write offset in the particle shader or to use soft particles in the render settings

 

Never used Water4 shader, so I'm not sure if this will work. But try switching inspector to debug mod and set custom RenderQueue for particle and waterfall material (something like 3010 or more).

 

OMG finally! For some reason the render queue for Water4 was set to 90000 by default. I've been banging my head on this for two days and now I can finally move on. THANKS GUYS!

 

Hi defaxer,
I'm using your awesome shader (standard VC) with a material setting of "fade" rendering mode.
I want all my vertices colors to start with aplha 0.
After some time i want to change part of the vertices to have a full alpha color.
How can i achieve this? it doesn't seem to work
At first, all of my mesh vertices have alpha 0 color.
Then, I'm setting some vertices color to full aplha in code, like the examples above, but they stay transparent (as long as my initial material color setting has albedo with allpha 0)

If my initial setting has a color with alpha > 0 it works, but it's not what i want.
Thanks!

 

Maybe the alpha values get multiplied with the specified alpha from the color, in this case you'd want to set the color alpha to one. Seems to be the case, as the color itself also gets multiplied with texture color

 

Awesome work. Thank you for it.

 

Does anybody have problems with this using the Metal API? Using Unity 5.2.3f1, Xcode stops with this message:

program_source:3:10: error: unknown type name 'FragmentCommonData'

constant FragmentCommonData _xlat_mtl_const1 = {float3(0.0, 0.0, 0.0), float3(0.0, 0.0, 0.0), 0.0, 0.0, float3(0.0, 0.0, 0.0), float3(0.0, 0.0, 0.0), float3(0.0, 0.0, 0.0), 0.0};​

 

I have the same problem but no solution, I'm unable to use this shader together with iOS Metal. Has anyone else been able to solve this?

 

Hi. Forgive me for the stupid question. I really want to use this tool and have no knowledge whatsoever about shaders (still didn't get to that part in Unity).
Can you tell me how to use this ? how do I assign a color to a vertex?

Thanks a lot

 

This is great. Is it possible to modify the shader to use for example vertex illumation as a mask to blend with another standard material. Add double slots for all the maps and vertex illumination would drive which maps to use. Thanks

 

Hi, this shader looks great but I just can't get it to work. My mesh just shows as White? I deleted the normal, metalic and albedo maps. I just want flat VC.



This is how it looks in my 3D app;

 

No. This can't be done. If only unity could blend materials by mask, same way unreal does it. But I have no idea how to achieve this.

Seems like you are using deferred rendering. If so are you using latest shader version? It should look same in forward and deferred now.

 

It can be done, there are implementations like UBER which support this (or even RTP if you need terrain like behaviour with splatmaps). Don't know exact technique behind this, though

 

Standard shader like this uses all available data input slots:
Position,
Color,
Normal,
Tangent,
TexCoord(0-4) so I dont have a place to squeeze more texture maps. If only I knew how to bypass that...

 

How can I find out what version it is? Doesn't say in the visual studio script from what I can see?

 

Thanks so much for sharing this awesome shader! The updated version you linked in the first post doesn't appear to have the strength slider any longer. Is it accessed elsewhere now?

 

Oh, it must be broken for a while now I'll try to update shader as soon as I can

 

Looking forward to it, thanks defaxer.

 

Hello defaxer,
Thanks for your great shader

I'm doing a "minecraft" game. Is it possible to do a shader where vertex color simulates lights (emission is albedo texture color * vertex color) ?

 

Hello all. I'm interested in a voxel shader too. The solution should be to pack the illumination amount inside the alpha channel of the vertex color, but I'm not good in CG programming at the moment. I can help in beta testing or with a donation .

 

Hi! That can be done easy in A Quick Way:

1. open UnityVC.cginc in UnityVC folder
2. If using Forward rendering find a function half4 fragForwardBase_VC
3. If using Deferred rendering find void fragDeferred_VC
4. In corresponding function change line c.rgb += Emission(i.tex.xy); to c.rgb += i.color.a * s.diffColor;
5. That should work

and a Slow Way, after I'll get there and fix an old bug with intensity, I will think about MultipurposeVertexColorStandardShader later, as there can be a lot of variations on how to handle vertex color in shader.

PS. I'm using colors to animate vegetation, or flags. Crytek were using colors to alter character body constitution in Crysis.

 

So many uses for vertex colors out there. No wonder you are getting so many requests for each and every little thing that can be done
Good job so far.

 

Hello! Your vertex shader is great and is definitely what I was looking for, but unfortunately it seems not to work with duplicated object (or objects sharing the same mesh). Is there something wrong on my side or is it a "global" issue? Could you help me with that? Here is how it looks: once duplicated, both o bject and its copy turn black

 

Hello everyone! Just updated shader with new version (0.9).

Thanks for pointing that out! From now on shader has versions.

Fixed vertex color intensity feature.
From now intensity works differently,e.g. if it is lower than 1, vertex color lerps with base material color. Like so:

while old version just darkened material.

I couldn't replicate that bug with new version. So you can try that version out and see if it's fixed.

P.S. In next version vertex alpha will affect shadow transparency.

 

Thanks! It seems to be fixed. I've encountered another problem: vertex colors work only with directional lights. Point and spotlights show models in grey color only.

 

Just tried it with both spot and point lights and it's working (try it on debug sphere). But there is other prob: in forward and deferred rendering materials interact different with these kind of lights.

 

Unfortunately in my case it is not working even on debug sphere Notice that I've disabled skybox and ambient light. If I re-enable those, the point light seems to "decolorize" debug spheres (see last screenshot). I've checked it on another hardware, the problem is still there.

 

Hey there,

Any chance outlines are going to be supported? Or how can i do it myself if you are not going to do it?

 

Hi! No I was not planning outlines support. Can't tell If it's possible to squeze into my shader without sacrificing some advanced features like parallax or anything else. And I'm not aware of any suchx standard shader solution, only legacy

 

RenderingMode Fade= Vertex colors black and white, are both treated the same and those parts of the material become transparent, leaving only the other vertex colors showing the albedo map..

RenderingMode Transparent = Black is transparent, while the white areas are just more whiter...

This is with Vertex Color at 1.0

So I'm wondering is there a way to get transparency(where vertices are painted black) +vertex colors overlayed, while not effecting the original albedo map brightness (for areas painted white)? Currently the closest I can get to what I was wanting is using RenderingMode Transparent ...its just the white vertex colored areas are the closet to having the original albedo texture color (only its alot brighter/whiter, changing Vertex Color down to 0.0 gets the original color, but then no transparency or other vertex colors are shown) .... any way to get that?

Anyway was just playing with it, never bothered with the vertex coloring stuff before.